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@Ghostcrawler Targeted, actionable jungle suggestions

FancyKiddo·1/31/2015, 3:39:04 AM·7 votes·1,302 views

Howdy people, it's the FancyKiddo:

I've long been in love with League; I've been jungling my merry way along for years now, and I've mostly enjoyed all of it. Sadly, I recently find myself being more of a fan of League than a player; it just doesn't have the same fun aspect as it used to have. I'm honestly tired of playing jungle against the same Lee/Vi/J4 for 2-3 seasons in a row; I'm tired of fun champions whom I would love to play staying nerfed to complete uselessness even though they've been that way forever (Poppy and Urgot, why hello!); I'm tired of seeing questionable balance decisions come through completely destroying pretty-much-fine champions while certain ones get away scott free.

Honestly, it's made me all a bit ragey, but more sad than anything else. League has been a big part of my life for a long time, and I hate to see myself hovering my cursor over the icon and then not double-clicking it. That's just sad.

@Ghostcrawler came on recently saying that he's looking for targeted and actionable suggestions instead of ragey threads, so I've decided to make one of those with the things that I think would improve League, specifically the jungling experience, as that's what I'm most invested in. Some day I want to be a game designer somewhere (presently only a lowly graphics programmer at Firaxis), hopefully Riot, so if my advice sounds bad, please tell me; I'm looking to improve my thinking and I know that I don't have all of the best solutions for all of the problems.

{quoted} As always, we appreciate the feedback. The more targeted and actionable it is, the more useful it is for us. I can go tell the balance team "Boards say you suck" and they would kind of look at me and say "Okay, what changes in how we adjust champions should we make?" and I would say "You just suck." There's not really a lot of direction for improvement there.

Hugs, GC

Let's talk jungle. There are a few levers in the game that determine how well someone jungles: clear time, health during a clear, and ganking potential. Back in Season 3, there used to be a lot more diversity in the jungle, as choosing champions who focused on these things individually (except health during a clear, I suppose; sorry Warwick) was more rewarding. Sure, you had your Lee Sin back then as you do now, but we used to see play from Shyvana, and Master Yi, and Tryndamere, and Alistar and Nautilus... the list goes on and on. That diversity in the jungle made things fun; as a laner and as a jungler, you never knew what you'd be facing against, and that meant that you had to develop a plan to deal with the enemy as you went along.

In the present jungle, those levers don't mean too much. Part of the problem is that there are champions who do all of the above, and part of the problem is that only one of those choices is very rewarding. Now, junglers have a set dominant strategy; no matter what the enemy jungler picks, your jungler should pick Lee/Jarvan/Vi and play exactly the same way. There are no decisions in the jungle anymore.

The changes I'm going to suggest are aiming to bring better reward to alternate strategies and make other champions good choices in the jungle, so that we see more diversity there and can have a more fun meta game.

  1. Nerf the outliers:

Jarvan: Jarvan's passive now only applies to champions.

  • Jarvan presently has a fast, safe clear AND great ganks. I want to see him in more of a tank jungler role, so I think cutting back on his clear speed by nerfing his passive is a good way to keep his other strengths and bring him down to a more even level

Vi: Blast Shield scales off of bonus health + a base amount (instead of maximum health)

  • A lot of power lies in Vi's Denting Blows; it provides % HP damage, an AS buff, and an armor shred. But any nerf to that would severely limit Vi's capacity to duel. So instead of removing her ability to clear quickly or to gank well, I think that taking away her jungle survivability is a good place to start. Reducing the shield's effectiveness at early levels will go a long way toward making her think a lot more about going for a gank, since she won't always be at full health.

Lee: Sonic Wave's duration reduced and energy cost increased; Resonating Strike's cast range severely nerfed; Cripple's slow reduced at earlier levels

  • Lee's been in desperate need of nerfs for a long while, but I think that he's not that far off from balanced. Right now, he just lacks a lot of counterplay, mostly around his Cripple->Sonic Wave combo when ganking.
  • Reducing Sonic Wave's duration will force Lee to decide whether or not to go in sooner, so that he can't laze about and fall off if he decides (3 seconds later) that he doesn't feel like it. Lee's supposed to be high-risk high-reward, but presently there's very little risk because Lee has so long to assess the situation before committing.
  • Walking far far back from Lee (or flashing away from him) and still having him Resonating Strike to you is a horrible feeling. Fizz was just nerfed to no longer hit enemies who move out of range, and I think that was a good move; doing the same to Lee will force him to care a lot more about positioning if he wants to Resonating Strike; and it gives the enemy the ability to avoid Resonating Strike by creating distance.
  • Cripple's slow has always been a major pain when Lee ganks; only a terrible Lee will miss Tempest, and Cripple's slow is so powerful that it guarantees that Sonic Wave will land, opening up the player to Lee's full combo. Reducing the movement slow (perhaps even removing it completely at level 1) early game will pull back Lee's success rate in early ganks, making him decide between guaranteed farming or perhaps assist gold (at the present the decision is easy: guaranteed assist gold trumps every time).
  • Might Lee be weak after these changes? I doubt it; they don't reduce his mobility (much), nor do they take away his safe and fast jungle clear, but they do cut back on his ganking ability and make him a little less consistent.
  1. Do something for farming junglers

Right now the jungle isn't great for Twitch and Yi, or any assassin or really anybody who wants a lot of gold and a lot of XP. On the gold front, things are pretty okay as long as one can farm decently, but on the XP side, junglers always fall behind. It's not unheard of for the jungler, despite farming his little heart out all laning phase, to be behind the support and ADC in levels.

The reasoning behind that, of course, is that a behind jungler then has more disincentive to gank. After all, if he does gank and fails, he'll be even more behind in XP; and, being behind in levels, his ganks will be dangerous and might feed the enemy a double kill! But I think that one can dissuade ganks without dissuading jungling.

My suggestions would be:

The jungler gets a buff after killing a camp. This buff causes the next camp to grant bonus XP. This buff is lost on taking damage from or dealing damage to a champion, unless you are in the enemy jungle.

  • This buff is targeted at making your farming junglers level up with the rest of the team. Choosing to gank (or getting counterjungled) causes you to miss out on XP, making counterjungling more productive (puts the enemy jungler behind if you attack him) and making the tradeoff between farming and ganking more pronounced.

Upon clearing all of your camps, the non-buff camp that you cleared first respawns immediately.

  • This is to reward those champions who clear quickly. S5 brought with it longer camp respawns, causing champions with hyper-fast clearing speeds to become less efficient; after all, why take Shyvana if she's just going to spend a minute standing around waiting for a camp to respawn, when you could take Lee who can clear 1 minute slower but has all of Lee's benefits?
  • Now, Shyvana can farm to her heart's content, and clearing faster clearly rewards her. Notice also that this is based on the camps that you clear; counter jungling will cause those camps not to respawn that fast, so you can still take the enemy's Gromp and there's nothing that s/he can do about it until the normal respawn timer ticks all the way down.
  • AND, this makes the decision to gank more of a decision than a necessity; right now, if you clear all of your camps too quickly, the obvious choice is to gank. With this change, the chance to continue farming is added to that, and now no matter what (unless you're getting counterjungled to bits), there will always be a real choice between farming or ganking.

Hopefully that would cover it for farming junglers. Those changes would see the rise of carry junglers, and assassin junglers, and power junglers, once more, and that's diversity that I would love to see.

  1. Do something for tank junglers

Tank junglers are in a peculiar spot where their slower clears combined with bruisers' decent defensive capabilities cause tanks to actually be less healthy in jungle than bruisers. That's not how it should be, since bruisers have a faster jungle, as well, and generally can gank just as well (or better since they won't have to go back so often and will be higher level).

Itemization isn't the way to go to solve this, though. We've tried that before, and it's always led to snowballing effects and to junglers being more effective outside of the jungle than in it. No, I think that we should look at a system that hasn't been looked at in S5: masteries.

Defensive jungling masteries rework:

  • Move Oppression to Tier 1, Move Swiftness to Tier 2 (requires Oppression), shove Tough Skin to Tier 2 (buff to 2/4 damage resisted), shove Bladed Armor to Tier 3, and add a new mastery to Tier 4 (requires Bladed Armor):
  • Jungler's Fortitude (Take 10/20/30% less damage from monsters, and abilities cost 10/20/30% less mana when used on monsters)

Why are masteries the way to go? Because one has to give up offensive power in order to take them, and that's a big deterent for bruisers to take them. By shoving the jungling masteries into higher tiers, we force junglers to go deep into the defensive tree to gain that healthy jungle clear; to get the max buff, you have to go 15 points in, and that means that you can't take Tier 4 nor Tier 5 in offense, which is a big thing for bruiser junglers. Tank junglers, who already go into that tree, basically get this for free (3 mastery points, but that's not too bad).

With that, tank junglers will be able to fit the healthy jungle/good ganks section, where I feel they definitely belong. We shouldn't increase their clear speeds so that they don't become the dominant strategy.

  1. Do something about poachers

Now, I know that a lot of junglers will cringe when I say this; historically, these changes have always hurt junglers more than they've reduced poaching. It doesn't have to be that way, though.

  • Increase all monster's damage by some amount; Add passive to jungle items (including machete) to block that same amount per monster hit

Tada! Now monsters hit laners harder, forcing them to take the pain for stealing your gold and XP.

  1. Do something for lackluster junglers

There will still be some champions who really should see jungle play but who just aren't up to snuff in their own category. These champions will need buffs to keep them competitive. Off the top of my head, I don't know many, but certainly feel free to pipe up; and, this of course can be tweaked as we see how the more general changes change the face of the jungle scene altogether

  • Nautilus: Passive deals (4 + 12 * level) damage, half damage to champions
  • Leona: When Sunlight expires on a minion or monster, it deals damage

Yes, I really want to see Leona jungle be a thing.

  • Evelynn: Evelynn's first autoattack (in 3 seconds) after leaving stealth stuns the target for .25/.5/.75 seconds

This was horribly toxic when Evelynn could stand on top of you while in stealth, but at present Evelynn's ganks are, let's face it, terrible. She brings lackluster damage and no CC to the fight, and her clear is one of the least healthy in the game. Making her ganks better seems more appropriate than increasing her tankiness

  • Suggestions?

Thanks for sticking around for all of that (if you did!) Let's get some discussion going, and hopefully we can show the Riot designers the type of changes that we want instead of just telling them that we dislike what we're getting.

Stay Fancy!

26 Comments

Teridax681/31/2015, 10:01:22 AM3 votes

(Wall of text alert. TL;DR is the bolded parts)

Another possible way of buffing tank junglers:

  • Have item 1039 and its upgrades restore 1% of the wielder's maximum health and mana per second. This is a nerf to Machete's power spike in sustain when you upgrade it to the next tier, but a huge mid-to-late-game buff to tank junglers' sustain (you get approximately double to triple/quadruple of both). Riot seems to want tanky junglers to have slow clears, and that's fine, but right now tanks still tend to have less healthy clears than damage-focused junglers, especially when the latter get life steal. This would also buff damage junglers slightly, and may be worth increasing the damage output of jungle camps outside of the early game, but would also be less relevant, as those kinds of junglers have easier access to healing and would therefore be less affected.
  • Remove the on-hit requirement on Hunter's Machete and item 3715 , and instead have the damage over time refresh as long as you deal damage to the monster/champion. This would give mage junglers like Fiddlesticks (not a tank jungler, obviously, but still a jungler who doesn't use jungle items well) an incentive to get Machete and build like a proper jungler, but would also buff a lot of tanks and tanky bruisers (Nautilus , Sejuani , Leona , etc.) whose clears are heavily AoE-dependent, yet who struggle against even Raptor and Wolf camps due to how Machete only caters to single-target on-hit damage right now. Saber is, similarly, only really good on autoattackers with enough sticking power to keep on autoattacking, when it could be the perfect opportunity for more spell-based champions to benefit from an additional source of damage. The 20% reduced damage would also be amazing on tankier junglers, though if the resulting active becomes too powerful it might be worth shaving this off.
  • (Maybe) have Jungler's DoT increase over time, instead of per upgrade (something like 28 + 4 x level, or even a non-linear increase). This would reinforce the theme of tanky junglers having slower early clears, but having a much better time clearing camps in the mid-to-late game. The DoT quickly becomes less and less valuable to damage-oriented junglers, who buy items to increase their damage, but would be extremely helpful for tank junglers, who don't really build anything to increase their damage output.
    • With this in mind, perhaps it would also be worth reverting the recent price increase to Machete's upgrades: that change was done because getting an early kill could easily snowball the jungler into a super-early power spike, but it also ended up making the first clear for tanky junglers even more grueling. Smoothing that power spike out by having the upgrade only provide the Smite bonus, and not a significantly improved jungle clear, would likely avoid the issue of snowballing entirely, and thus allow tank junglers to back earlier if needed.

An extreme (and possibly terrible) way of eliminating poaching entirely:

  • Make all non-river jungle camps (or just large non-river monsters) immune to damage unless they're being damaged by a champion wielding summoner 11 . You'd still be able to aggro monsters by attacking them, though, with the exception being item 3068 which wouldn't attract aggro on its own (this is long overdue). This would still allow for jungle camp stealing, but would prevent laners from poaching camps on their own.
    • Perhaps make this restriction only apply to each champion's own side of the jungle, which would allow laners to invade the enemy jungle and poach some monsters in a way that doesn't affect their own jungler.
  • Have monster experience go only to the killer instead of sharing it around (to avoid issues of XP stealing when giving a leash).
  • Remove the gold bonus on Machete and its upgrades and transfer it back to the jungle camps. Again, this would reduce the item's power spike when upgrading it, but since it was originally made to discourage poaching, it wouldn't be as necessary. There's also a lot of clutter on the tooltip, so it would help with that.
  • (Maybe) give Hunter's Machete and its upgrades a toggle that allows you to Smite allies in order to transfer a buff, preferably without incurring a cooldown or costing a charge, and maintaining the same remaining duration on the buff. The most immediate application would be blue or red buff, but could also potentially extend to other jungler buffs (you might want to give Heavy Hands to a laner so that they can damage a tower faster, or the Raptor buff to the support or a roamer so that they can clear wards, for example). So, when toggled off, Smite wouldn't be applicable to allies, but toggling it would cycle between your available buffs and allow you to transfer it to the ally of your choice.
    • In this case, perhaps remove Jungler and Bladed Armor's inability to kill monsters, as there would always be a way of giving buffs to the champion of your choosing. Instead, making non-jungler champions incapable of killing monsters on their own side of the jungle would prevent annoying situations like DoTs and delayed abilities accidentally stealing camps during a leash.
  • The reason why I think the above might be terrible is because it would seriously change lane dynamics: laners who are behind wouldn't have a "safe" way of accruing gold or experience, and the mage or marksman wouldn't be able to solo blue or red buff late-game to quickly obtain it. On the other hand, it would smooth out some edge cases, like bot lane being unbalanced because blue side has easier access to Krugs than red side has access to Gromp. It would also allow the jungler to come to a lane just to give a buff to the laner, instead of just coming over for ganks.
Toraso1/31/2015, 8:39:51 PM2 votes

You've clearly put a lot of thought into this. The changes sound absolutely wonderful, and I hope you get enough upvotes to skyrocket to Riot's attention. Cheers!

Standard o Honor2/1/2015, 2:45:14 AM2 votes

Wouldn't it be simpler just to have Hunter's machete's regen and damage scale based on damage mitigation. for example hunters machete does 25 dmg over 2 secs flat multiplied by 1+ physical mitigation X 1+magic mitigation. Have the regen rates do the same to allow tanky champs the ability to not completely get out done vs neutral monsters mid to late game.

So the beefier you build the better you get, the more damage it does and health regen it gets.

at 100 armour and 100 MR it would do 25X 1.5 X 1.5 damage over 2 secs 56.25 over 2 secs
if regen is 7 per sec it would get boosted to 7 X 1.5 X 1.5 = 16.875 per sec mana 3 per sec would be 3X 1.5 X1.5 = 6.75 mana per sec

Might have to put some exception making it only base armor and bonus from items to keep champs like rammus in check, but at least, this way tanky champs can compete a bit better with fast clear and lifesteal champs come mid game. Late game they would end up getting diminished returns on further armor gains so should balance out with a bit of # tweaking, perhaps only use the higher value between physical or magical mitigation.

chumbler1/31/2015, 7:22:25 AM1 votes

You know you're going to be completely ignored because they are flat out lying about that whole communication thing, right?

Wayward Killjoy1/31/2015, 5:25:18 PM1 votes

How would you deal with champions who were never designed to jungle taking advantage of some of these things to sink their dirty little claws into jungle camps? Riot has been clear that they don't want every top laner suddenly being able to jungle, and that they don't particularly like it when they design a champion for a certain role and they get absolutely uncontrollable somewhere else (Annie Support from S3-4, We're looking at you).

Cause they purposely blackballed Gnar out of jungle to keep him top lane. They kept Braum's damage extremely low in order to ground him as a support. They tied Kalista to a partner to dissuade her from going other places. They've been doing a LOT to keep champions in their roles.

SmokingPuffin1/31/2015, 5:49:15 PM1 votes

There are a few levers in the game that determine how well someone jungles: clear time, health during a clear, and ganking potential. Back in Season 3, there used to be a lot more diversity in the jungle

I don't remember this being a thing. I remember picking junglers who cleared camps fast and spent most of their time ganking. Nobody had any trouble with health sustain in clearing.

we used to see play from Shyvana, and Master Yi, and Tryndamere, and Alistar and Nautilus... the list goes on and on.

Maybe you meant season 2? S3 Alistar, Nautilus, Shyvana were all horrible, and Yi/Trynd were only pubstompers, not fit for games against competent opposition.

The jungler gets a buff after killing a camp. This buff causes the next camp to grant bonus XP. This buff is lost on taking damage from or dealing damage to a champion, unless you are in the enemy jungle.

I don't think you really want this. It encourages junglers to clear a side, then gank, then clear a side, then gank. That's already the optimal play for the top tier jungle picks today; which means you are only reinforcing the current top picks as the top picks.

Jungler's Fortitude (Take 10/20/30% less damage from monsters, and abilities cost 10/20/30% less mana when used on monsters)

This is crazy strong. Every jungler would find a way to take it, except maybe Fiddlesticks. Even then, he'd like it. We'd go back to level 3 ganks with double buff as the dominant meta, which is something Riot really wanted to discourage in season 5.

Anyway, there's no chance that mastery changes make tanks able to compete with bruisers. Bruiser junglers took 21 defense for most of the history of the game. Need kit changes.

Tada! Now monsters hit laners harder, forcing them to take the pain for stealing your gold and XP.

Unlikely to do much. You'd need camps to survive longer against solo lane damage output, and then you'd be pretty sad as a jungler.